Saturday, February 11, 2012

The Managerial Revolution

My wife says I try to say too much in one blog post. This will not be an exception.

Nelson Rockefeller

I’ve been thinking about this post for awhile, and was
originally going to call it “The New Rockefeller Republicans.” After serving as Governor of New York, Nelson
Rockefeller ran for every presidential election in the 1960s, and was
eventually Gerald Ford’s vice president.
He had crazy amounts of money, and a kind of WASP-y (see my post four
years ago on John McCain) noblesse oblige. He supported the arts, achieved real progress
in environmental conservation, greatly increased transportation and public
housing, was tough on crime, especially drugs, but also fought valiantly against
racial discrimination, while taking a decidedly moderate approach on
abortion. He was an enemy of ideology,
ignoring the growing concerns in the 1960s and ‘70s that would become social
conservatism, taking a friendly, accomodationist stance on foreign policy, and
having a tin ear for questions of limited government. He worked (at least in his mind) pragmatically
for a better society.

But he was only at the center of a major mid-century
movement. Thomas Dewey, also governor of
New York, ran for the presidency all through the 1940s, battling against the
conservative wing of the Republican party, led by Robert Taft. Put simply, Taft articulated a philosophy in
opposition to FDR, Dewey did not.
Responsibility, pragmatism.

Dewey helped Eisenhower defeat Taft for control of the party
in the 1950s. Eisenhower was a pretty
decent president – but thoroughly middle-of-the-road. Central to Eisenhower’s presidency was the
rising civil rights movement, in which Eisenhower fought hard for tolerance
(not a bad goal) by sending federal troops into the states, while conservatives
worried whether this goal was being achieved through destructively un-Constitutional
means and an ever creeping federal State.

And Rockefeller passed the baton to George H.W. Bush, who
condemned conservative philosophy as “voodoo economics,” ignored social
concerns, and, for example with the Americans with Disabilities Act, continued
to fight for a more pleasant easy-going world while ignoring concerns about the
limits of government and the danger of perverse incentives. (As the father of a wheelchair-bound child, I
can tell you all about the glories and follies of the ADA – another time.)

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is surely in this class,
with his truly ridiculous crusades for public health, his general fight to make
New York more pleasant – like a luxury hotel, he says – mixed with his general insouciance
about economics and the limits of govenrment

Mitt Romney, with his maneuvering on abortion, unwillingness
to take a strong stand on economics, and defense of a health care policy that
ignored the dangers of creeping government – not to mention his apparent
support from a class of “responsible,” non-ideological, “establishment” types,
and even his Northeastern pedigree – has been labeled as the inheritor of the
Rockefeller tradition. But perhaps this
new generation of Rockefeller Republicans has an important difference.

Please be clear: what follows is not intended as an
endorsement (or rejection) of Romney, or of the movement of which he may be
part. It is simply an observation. We must understand before making judgments.

Consider some of Romney’s peers. Example One: Chris Christie, the fabulous
governor of our great state of New Jersey.
Christie ran as a moderate; he was frankly dishonest with the people of
New Jersey. Once in office he led a
charge to get the books in order, cutting spending especially by standing
ferociously against the spend-thriftiness of the unions. He has refused to raise taxes, but unlike the
Reagan generation, who made tax cutting the prime concern and didn’t really
worry about spending, Christie and his peers have refused tax hikes as an
illegitimate excuse for runaway spending, but have kept their eyes on the
bottom line, not on the philosophical goods of tax cuts. Christie appears to be a Catholic in good
standing and a pro-life social conservative, and he is one of America's most exciting politicians when it comes to dealing with urban problems – but that is not his focus. He is just doing the responsible thing. New Jersey has been living beyond its means
for way too long, and it has to be stopped.
If Christie had to lie (or at least not tell the truth) to the voters in
order to get elected, and if he has to ignore other good causes while fighting
for these goals, so be it.

Rep. Paul Ryan

The same is true at the federal level. Consider Paul Ryan, the great congressman
from my home state of Wisconsin, and the de facto leader of the Republicans in
Congress. Ryan is a budget geek. Again, he seems to be a pro-life Catholic,
and I think he is in favor of lower taxes, but that isn’t his focus. Ryan is worried about entitlement spending
and how to get our books in order.

One of Christie’s closest friends is the governor of Indiana
(and still my dearest desire from a contested convention), Mitch Daniels. Daniels is a Presbyterian, but also
apparently very pro-life and otherwise generally a social conservative. But when contemplating a run for president
last Spring (he decided not to run for personal reasons) he infamously called
for a “truce” on social issues while we focus on the budget. Many conservatives have responded that there
can be no truce – witness the last week’s events, with Planned Parenthood
whipping a breast cancer research organization into line, the Obama administration
demanding that people with moral qualms about contraception, sterilization, and
abortifacient drugs must pay for other people to get them, and the West Coast’s
Ninth Circuit court ruling that there is a Constitutional right to define marriage
however feels comfortable to social liberals.
But obviously Daniels had a point: we can focus more or less on these
issues, and use more or less firey rhetoric even when taking a firm stand on
actual policies. Meanwhile, Daniels says, we face a new “red menace” – not Communism, but debt. As governor of Indiana, Daniels is famous for
cutting spending, finding new ways to finance freeways, battling the
ever-voracious unions, and (everyone’s favorite!) making the DMV more
efficient.

The list goes on.
Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, is a pro-life Evangelical focused
on fighting the irresponsibility of the unions (both the educational policies
of the teachers and the general spend-thriftiness of all the public unions). So is John Kasich, the governor of Ohio.

Mitt Romney can be read as part of this crowd. Of course (perhaps) he is pro-life,
pro-marriage, socially conservative, etc.
He has, after all, an exemplary family life, and is a leader in one of
America’s most conservative churches.
But like Chris Christie, his biggest political booster, he has set
everything else aside to fight the Red Menace.
Perhaps – I don’t know, but perhaps – he decided in Massachusetts that
he would ignore all else, even lying about his position on abortion, in order
to get the budget in order. He was not
great (though not bad) on taxes, not great on jobs (though he helped), and his
decision on health care reform was not the best (though, I have to say, it is
defensible, was the majority-conservative position before Obamacare – note that
this was a non-issue when Romney ran in 2008 – and may have been the best that
could be done in uber-liberal Massachusetts).
But he did balance the budget, taking Massachusetts from deep in red ink
to a big rainy day fund.

Romney explains his position on abortion

Perhaps Romney is actually the Chris Christie running for
President. Not running like Chris
Christie was after the election, but running like Chris Christie was before the
election. Keep the focus on the other
guy (Christie was also up against an unpopular mis-managing liberal), just tell
people you’re responsible, don’t tell them just how radical you want to be, get
what mandate you can, and then kick butt once you’re in office, hoping that you
can accomplish enough in your first term to help the country, and maybe even
win people’s affection (as Christie has in super-liberal New Jersey) when they
can support what you’ve accomplished, and not what you’re threatening to
accomplish. Christie’s show-downs with
the unions look a lot better in hindsight than in foresight.

Gov. Chris Christie

I’m not saying Romney has Christie’s skills – surely he does
not have his pugnacity, for example. But
perhaps these new Rockefellers are of a different type. Whereas Dewey, Eisenhower, Rockefeller, and
Bush-41 just vaguely fought for a better, more welcoming world, without any
sense of social or political philosophy, the new Rockefellers – Romney,
Christie, Daniels, Ryan, Walker, Kasich, etc. – have a very strong social and
political philosophy, but believe that this Red Menace is so dangerous that all
else needs to be made secondary while we battle it.

One interesting corollary of this belief is the way they
relate to politics. The old Rockefellers
jumped on FDR’s bandwagon in thinking the way to get elected was to please
everyone. The new Rockefellers – hardly fair
to even call them by his name, given their important differences – agree that
you need the support of the masses: How else to get elected in the states with
the biggest problems, like Massachusetts and New Jersey, or, as Daniels has
said, to get a big enough mandate to do the enormous heavy lifting required for
entitlement reform at the federal level? But profoundly unlike the Rockefellers, these guys are not handing out
goodies. In fact, the only thing they
are handing out is the bitter medicine of fiscal discipline. The Rockefellers were popular for popularity’s
sake. The Christie-Daniels Republicans
are trying to appease enough people that they can whip us into order.

To close – and lest my wife relinquish her claim that I try
to say too much in one post – I would like to make a wild prediction about the
twenty-first century. I have previously
argued a cockamamie theory that each century has its peculiar revolution and
character – typically with foreshocks at the end of the previous century and
the real avalanche in the second decade of the century. The eighteenth century had its somewhat
unreasonable hopes for reason. The
nineteenth century (focusing here on America) began with the Constitution, but
settled in with the Virginia dynasty, and then especially General Jackson’s
election in 1828. It was a century of “republicanism”:
a belief that, rightly ordered, the common man could be defended by a proper
constitution.

I recently attended a political science conference in which
nineteenth-century-Americanists pointed out that the idea of democracy was
anathema to the nineteenth century.
Democracy is mob-rule. Everything
in the Constitution – read the Federalist Papers! – is organized to prevent
democracy, to make sure that the 51% cannot inflict their prejudices and
self-interest on minorities of various sorts.

The twentieth century, with tremors in the late-nineteenth-century
populism of William Jennings Bryan and real victory in the Constitutional
Amendments of the 1910s, turned that consensus upside down. Now (yes, still now, for the twenty-first has
hardly begun) most Americans cannot even conceive of someone being opposed to
majority rule and direct votes. But we
are beginning to wake up to the damage done by this way of thinking. The ravages of consumerism, to be sure -- of, for example, supposing that if everyone's enjoying the Super Bowl halftime show, it must be okay. But even more, the ravages of government
give-aways, where pandering politicians sell the good of the nation short in
exchange for a few more votes. Populism
has had its day, and its successes and failures. (A post for another day: how rich are we
really – when the bill comes due?)

And so, perhaps, the twenty-first century will be the age of
the managers. Men like Chris Christie
and Mitt Romney, Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan, who set aside populist
rhetoric, set aside even a true portrayal of themselves to the voters, in order
to better manage the country. Romney is
portrayed by his opponents as wanting to “manage the decline.” But the belief of these new managers is that
management is the only way to avoid decline.

The same kind of people have taken over my university – this
is anecdotal, but perhaps significant.
Our new president and provost have very little to say about education, but lots to say about management, including, above all, getting our books in order. (Even in the university, "books" now means finances.) As I recall, even when I was a grad student
at the Catholic University of America – which was undergoing a profound
rediscovery of its religious and intellectual mission – we got a new Provost
interested not so much in education as in management. Consider the irony of schools changing this
job’s title to “Chief Educational Officer”: on one level, it claims to be about
education, but in fact, it’s a title out of management theory.

Good or bad? Well, a
bit of both. It’s not my point to
endorse it or condemn it, but to say, watch it come. These guys are right. The twentieth-century’s obsession with
democracy left a major deficit of serious management. Perhaps the next century will see us give up
on cult-of-personality populists trading handouts for votes, in favor of boring
technocrats who let us ignore the grime of politics while they fix the
problems. I think there are ways of
defending this way of life – far from Big Brother, most of these technocrats
seem also to realize, for example, the importance of the family, the local
community, and personal responsibility, and might be expected to overrule the ever-expanding
if-it-feels-good-do-it-ism of the twentieth-century. Super-manager Mitch Daniels insists that the goal is not more power for him, but less; his book is subtitled, "Saving America by Trusting Americans." There are abundant economic and social corollaries to a shift from mob-rule to management. But for now, I’ll leave it here.